Beautiful Ruins a Lovely Novel

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Beautiful Ruins (2013)

Jess Walter

Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780061928178

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No one who has visited Cinque Terre can forget it. Five towns separated by rocky mountain ridges hug the Ligurian coast and spill their bright pastels down the rock cleft toward the sea. One of them, Vernazza, features a peninsula jutting into the ocean that is crowned with the remains of a 15^th century castle. When viewed from the hiking trail high above, it is a beautiful ruin. It is child’s play to imagine romance in such a setting.

For all of that, Italy’s west coast is also a hard place. Opulent, fat-walleted jet setters frolic on beaches and self-lubricate in pricy bars in one village, while just miles away fishermen mend their nets, their sails, and their clothing–destitution just one bad haul away. It’s also child’s play to imagine broken dreams in such places.

Jess Walter’s brilliant new novel uses these physical and metaphorical settings to probe what we do with the ruins we encounter and make in our lives. Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame) is a ruin of sorts–a town blessed with beautiful coast line and cursed by inaccessibility and poverty, unlike nearby Portovenere, which is dotted with nightclubs, glitzy hotels, and cash-rich tourists. The former is home to Paquale Tursi, a child of poverty with a spattering of English, regret for a love gone wrong, dreams of converting his down-market Hotel Adequate View into a luxury destination, and one semi-regular American visitor, Alvis Bender, a writer who drinks more than he types. Pasquale’s world is about to be transformed in ways he can’t imagine when an American starlet, Dee Moray, inexplicably checks into his hotel, not one in Portovenere. It is 1962, and Dee is fresh from the set of Cleopatra, a big-budget bomb starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that is better known for scandal than fine acting.

I hesitate to say more because this is a book of external and interior discoveries. Suffice it to say that it goes back and forth between 1962 and now, and that Burton is indeed a character, though a relatively minor one. Actually, it’s hard to say who the main character is, though the book’s central mystery centers on Dee, and some heavy-duty soul-searching befalls Pasquale. The book is really about the aforementioned ruins, including a literal one visited by Dee and Pasquale. Just to tantalize, among the other ruins is the botched plastic surgery of Hollywood director Michael Deane; a ruinous relationship maintained for no good reason by his assistant, Claire Silver; the doomed script of Shane Wheeler, whose Italian is little better than Pasquale’s English; and Bender, the writer who doesn’t write. The central question is how we confront ruins–our disappointments, sins, inappropriate desires, personal limitations, and the ensnaring lies we tell. Can anyone find love among those ruins? Or redemption?

This is a beautifully written book that contains passages you feel compelled to read aloud. Walter’s skill is also displayed in the ease with which he moves us between numerous characters without confusing the reader, or breaking the pace appropriate for each scene. I marveled over the transitions, as some of the pacing is as languid as a daydream above Vernazza, and others as frenetic as a speedboat coursing the Ligurian Sea. My second metaphor will likely describe the pace at which you will rip through this novel. For lovers of irony, it’s almost inevitable that this book will be optioned for a movie. But you’ll have to read it to understand why that’s ironic.

Rob Weir